Ultimately someone has to vouch for “yes, this person is 18+”. People can’t self-attest, except through crappy biometric, so at some point a government ID has to be involved.

I’d trust my government over a credit reference agency that literally makes revenue from selling access to your private data.

What if I told you that by regulation, the EU age verification system has to be anonymous and that it’s only the AUKUS countries that are moving forward in a way where anonymity is “a nice to have”.

Denmark’s system, which is a front-runner implementation in the EU, is going to be fully ZKP.

And yes it’s basically built with tokens.

You identify with a government system in an app. The services issues you signed tokens that are anonymous. You hand these anonymous tokens over to the sites that demand proof of age.